Notes: Battlefield 2

Travel the world, meet interesting people and shoot them.

Within my circle of friends, I seem to be the only person with a lasting interest in the "shoot real people with virtual guns" form of video games. Many have dabbled here and there, tossing a grenade or shotgun blast in my general direction before moving on. Ah, harken back to the glory days of my cracked copy of Quake! (This one time, I totally owned this guy in CTF by hooking him with the grappling hook and zooming up to him, switching to grenade launcher and... hey, come back!)

I myself have skipped over a generation of FPS here and there, unwilling or unable to meet the preposterous computing or network demands of today's modern twitch monsters. But like a brainwashed illuminati operative unaware of his compulsive tendency to hoard shiny objects, I scurry back every so often to the genre and indulge in it's dark dissociative mechanics.

Enter Battlefield 2. I will spare you the detailed content rundown, as you can get that in myriad places. There are squad tools, multi-person land sea and air vehicles, a command communication system, huge maps, up to 64 player slots, a friendly rank and award system, built-in VOIP, well-balanced weapon kits, all that good stuff. And you can play it comfortably on a variety of systems without blowing out your processor. All that is great, but what really impresses me is the overall effect this detail has on the play experience.

Stopping to take pictures is ill-advised (I died here)

BF2 has really hit home as an immersion game. Playing counter-strike, there were always moments of forced tension - times when the counter-terror squad would slowly creep down the hall, sweeping for enemies, guns clutched loosely in sweating palms - but those were usually contrived elements. When it got right down to it, CS was a Doom deathmatch with more crouching. You don't actually have to stop, put your back against the wall, and peer around the door frame when you're advancing. It may look cool in the movies but the game is far more condusive to running around the corner hopping up and down and shooting wildly.

When an army is really functioning as a team, BF2 is not like that. As much as you hear about it in war stories, I've never actually been "pinned down" in a combat game. Pinned down means you're on your belly in the dirt behind a wall of low rubble watching tracer bullets fly overhead and hoping to God a ricochet doesn't make it through and take off a piece of your ass. It means not being able to move or stand without being shot. That happens here.

When you see an enemy down the road, and he sees you, you both have a split second to react. Do you run? Dive for cover? Unload your clip in his direction? Or do you drop to the deck, switch to single-fire and try to nail him somewhere soft before he can get a good shot? I suck at shoot-offs, but in guerilla combat I understand that they are fairly common.

In Dragon Valley, I often take the Spec Ops route, parachute onto a ridge at the edge of enemy territory, sneak through dense forest and plant C4 on their artillery stations.

The other day I was riding in a blackhawk when we were hit by anti-aircraft fire. The guy next to me was shot right out of the cab - the rest of us bailed to safety as the pilot brought the craft down in a smoking heap.

On Monday our squad got caught in a bloody line battle across a sun-parched beachhead. I peeked my head over an embankment to see a stretch of sand strewn with fallen soldiers. Bullets and anti-tank rockets flew everywhere.

Although the immersion factor is as much a function of smart teamwork as anything else, and there are lots of video game caveats (shock paddles can be used to instantly treat any kind of life-threatening injury), BF2 really does come remarkably close to war movie battle tactics without losing the central element of casual play.

Oh, they also have the F-35. Which is awesome.

Postscript:
In the interest of fairness, here are the cons:

• There are bugs and glitches that are still being tested and fixed, par for the course with modern gaming.


• The flying vehicles handle like crap and can't go very far outside the very small mission maps before they are shot down.


• The rank system is friendly at first, but becomes brutal once you get to Lance Corporal. They expect you to play about 250 hours before you get any further rewards beyond the initial cookies.


• Most people on public ranked servers are unreliable cheeseheads.


• I die a lot. Clearly this is a major flaw in the game design.